You’d think that, by now, every segment of the voting population — however big or small — has been identified and lassoed by one political organization or another.

Max Hamel found a gap.

“We were working on other projects dealing with country music and just thought about whether there was a country music equivalent of Rock the Vote, and we just assumed that there was,” said Hamel, a 38-year-old from Virginia whose career has spanned political campaigns, and now, corporate affairs. “We started talking to folks in Nashville and quickly learned that there wasn’t.”

So Hamel and his friend, Chris Ashby, did what anyone would do to Rock the Vote, country-style: They twanged it.

Hamel and Ashby’s brainchild, a 501(c)(3) called Twang That Vote, seeks to bring the concerns and values of country music fans into the political process. In promotional literature, they’re billing it as “the biggest thing to hit politics and country music,” adding, “It’s about time D.C. listened to some country.”

First on the agenda? Ridding people of the idea that country fans are all white, male Republicans.

“There’s 100 million self-identified country music fans around the country,” Hamel said. “And the demographics were surprising to us. … When you’re talking about 100 million people, it looks very much like the United States as a whole.” Hamel said he was especially surprised that most people who identified themselves as country music fans were women, and he was taken aback by just how far removed from the political process many of them were.

“It looks like there’s about 40 [million] to 50 million who are not registered to vote or vote infrequently,” said Hamel, adding that those numbers instantly gave his organization part of its objective.

“The mission is to identify them, educate them about the importance of voting and turn them out,” he said.

Continued hand-sitting on Election Day bodes poorly for country music fans and politicians alike.

“This is a demographic that’s open to both parties if both parties reach out and talk to them,” Hamel said. “It shouldn’t be a foregone conclusion that they’re going to vote Republican.” He said that, by year’s end, Twang That Vote should have enough specific data about the concerns of country music fans that “we can be an organization that pushes that out to elected officials and say, ‘This is how different everybody is. They’re not some monolithic block. You can’t just paint them as white rednecks and you need to talk to them about issues that matter and these are the issues that they care about.’”

Hamel says “doing it through music is obviously great,” and he’s already gotten support from such artists as the Oak Ridge Boys’ Richard Sterban, Charlie Daniels and Eric Paslay, plus someone who perfectly straddles the world of country and Congress: Ayla Brown, the daughter of Sen. Scott Brown.

In order to earn the support of such artists, Hamel said he had to assure them of one thing: There would be no Dixie Chicks moment.

“We’re not going to walk them into a punch. … They’re so risk-averse after the whole Dixie Chicks thing,” Hamel said, referring to the 2003 controversy when the group’s lead singer, Natalie Maines, said she was “ashamed” of President George W. Bush.

“We made a commitment to them and our corporate partners that we’re not going to get involved in compromising their brands as artists or their brands as corporations. We’re just going to talk straight about the importance of voting and civic duty and leave the rest to other people.”

Twang That Vote isn’t likely to have a national organization in place by Election Day — he promises one by 2016 — but says it’ll focus on voter registration efforts in such country-music-loving battleground states as Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.